Facebook Cambridge Analytica and the ICO
As the ICO seeks warrant to obtain evidence from Cambridge Analytica we examine whether more stringent enforcement powers are likely to follow.
In an announcement made on 19 March 2018, the Information Commissioner confirmed that she was seeking an urgent warrant to access the servers of Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy implicated in the misuse of data from, allegedly, 50m Facebook profiles and influenced, some claim, the outcome of the US presidential election. The data was harvested from Facebook through a personality test called thisisyourlife (the App) that captured the personal information of both the test taker and their circle of Facebook friends, ostensibly for academic purposes. This data was then passed onto Cambridge Analytica, in breach of Facebook’s Terms of Service. The Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) intervention is a timely reminder to data controllers of the risks of providing data to third parties and may be a prelude to an increasingly assertive approach from the ICO following the implementation of the GDPR.
For more information, please read our article "Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the ICO".
_11zon.jpg?crop=300,495&format=webply&auto=webp)
_11zon.jpg?crop=300,495&format=webply&auto=webp)
